Protector
From the back cover: The Mission of Phssthpok Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his 32,000 years -- his mission, to save, develop and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some 2 1/2 million years before. Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days -- Brennan figured to meet that ship first... He was never seen again -- at least not by those alive at the time.
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What Hacker News says
- There have been a couple science fiction novels with this premise:
Protector[0] by Larry Niven
David Weber's Dahak trilogy, available as the Empire from the Ashes[1] omnibus
- A single book? Impossible. I don't think I could even name my favorite Zelazny or PKD. Many of the works of both are in the running. As is "Dune", for sure. Possibly "Snow Crash". "Protector" might not quite make the cut, but comes somewhat close - from my recollection it was my favorite Niven (not counting short stories)... I'm currently finally getting around to "The Mote In God's Eye". Further back, "Foundation" was pretty amazing, and I've a bit of a soft spot for "Childhood's End". Bester's "The Demolished Man" is well worth a read, but I think also doesn't quite make the cut.
- ISRU tends to make no sense at all when you have to move things from place to place, it makes more sense when you use them in place.
For instance there may be some usable ice at the moon's poles maybe even some carbon. You could get oxygen out of rocks one way or another. You could make rocket fuel and launch stuff the conventional way but there are two problems: (1) Earth is the most competitive and cheapest market for everything in the solar system, and (2) lunar colonists might see volatiles as precious and decide to circularize them rather than expend them. [1] [2] Contrast that to Earth which has plenty of volatiles.
There is the idea of O'Neill and Heinlein [1] of the lunar mass driver, the picture you get from The High Frontier and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that it looks like a maglev train a few km long is totally wrong because your elevation angle is pretty high if you want to target the Earth-Moon L1 point or the Earth or LEO (assuming you can aerobrake reliably) If it is a few km long it is a slanted hole a few km deep. I don't know about coilguns but a railgun with 2.5 km/s that would fit on a ship has been tested [3] and you need 3.5 km/s to get to L1 -- one way or another I think a viable mass driver looks like the Paris Gun and shoots small payloads. If you could launch a 1kg payload per second you could put up a rail car worth of material in a day.
O'Neill's students thought a lot about the "catcher" for stuff from the lunar mass driver and never came up with anything convincing if anybody else has I haven't seen it.
[1] See The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
[2] Niven's Protector talks about the problem of very long-term space colonies , starships and stuff losing volatiles at steady rate no matter how well you try to keep them in.
[3] ... and burns up the barrels
- Protector by Larry Niven (1973) also features a gravity-powered telescope.
- > Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi.
I'd also suggest a good look at Baxter's books and Robert L Forward's too.
I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot. Timemaster starts out with:
> There exist semieducated but obstinate people who have raised the concept of strict local causality to godhead, and attempt to use such words as "obviously" and "it only makes sense that ..." in an attempt to "prove" that their version of causality cannot be violated, and that any sort of time machine is logically impossible. From my reading of the scientific literature, they are wrong. If I receive a letter from this sort of person complaining about the "impossibility" of the time machines in this novel, I will throw the letter in the nearest wastebasket... unless the letter is accompanied by a reprint of a scientific paper published in Physical Review (or any other reputable, refereed scientific journal), written by the person writing the letter, which proves that the paper "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, Echeverria, Klinkhammer, Thorne, and Yurtsever, is erroneous.
My take on it is more of a "what is the focus of the story?" Is it the soft sciences? Psychology and sociology and politics ... and the Foundation.
Or is it one more of challenges met with the STEM disciplines of physics and astronomy and biology?
It's also not a "it is either a this or that." Some books can be both and I think that Clarke is a prime example of this. 2001 is as much of a story of psychology as it is about astronomical distances and the ship needed to accomplish that goal. The Songs of Distant Earth is about two cultures clashing ... with the real problems of engineering a ship to travel (it's a softer story than it is hard).
Protector by Niven likewise scores high on both the soft and hard scales.
Foster tends to higher on the 'soft' side of the scale, though sometimes it edges up there with some real biology and the limits of technology are sometimes real limits.
And so, it is "are the challenges that the characters surmount solved with tools developed from the soft or hard sciences?"
"Use the Force Luke" is not a hard science solution.
- From Protector, by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1973
"Nick Sohl was coming home.
...He had gone mining in Saturn's rings, with a singleship around him and a shovel in his hand (for the magnets used to pull monopoles from asteroidal iron did look remarkably like shovels)...
A century ago monopoles had been mere theory and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist apart from a south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. Quantum theory implied that they might exist independently.
The first permanent settlements had been blooming among the biggest Belt asteroids when an exploring team found monopoles scattered through the nickel-iron core of an asteroid. Today they were not theory, but a thriving Belt industry. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse-square. In practical terms, a monopole-based motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. But monopole mining was still a one man operation.
Nick's luck had been poor. Saturn's rings were not a good region for monopoles anyway; too much ice, too little metal. The electromagnetic field around his cargo box probably held no more than two full shovelfuls of north magnetic pole. Not much of a catch for a couple weeks backbreaking labor... but still worth good money at Ceres."
